Korean version of Inventory Of Complicated Grief scale: Psychometric properties in Korean adolescents

Abstract

We aimed to validate the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG)-Korean version among 1,138 Korean adolescents, representing a response rate of 57% of 1,997 students. Participants completed a set of questionnaires including demographic variables (age, sex, years of education, experience of grief), the ICG, the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI) and the Lifetime Incidence of Traumatic Events-Child (LITE-C). Exploratory factor analysis was performed to determine whether the ICG items indicated complicated grief in Korean adolescents. The internal consistency of the ICG-Korean version was Cronbach's a = 0.87. The test-retest reliability for a randomly selected sample of 314 participants in 2 weeks was r = 0.75 (P < 0.001). Concurrent validity was assessed using a correlation between the ICG total scores and the CDI total scores (r = 0.75, P < 0.001). The criterion-related validity based on the comparison of ICG total scores between adolescents without complicated grief (1.2 ± 3.7) and adolescent with complicated grief (3.2 ± 6.6) groups was relatively high (t = 5.71, P < 0.001). The data acquired from the 1,138 students was acceptable for a factor analysis (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy = 0.911; Bartlett's Test of Sphericity, χ